Globalization over the last 500 years - the long view

The rise of the West?

Are Western countries really dominant now because of something intrinsic about their culture, or is it more likely an expression of a series of historical accidents?

Actually, Western geopolitical dominance has only been very brief, in the scheme of things, and most theories of the ‘rise of the West’ are hollow. What has traditionally been called "the rise of the West" is more accurately described as an increasingly interconnected globalization since 1492. Current Western dominance is real, but historically bounded—a consequence of unique material opportunities that are now being eroded by technological equalization.

The conquest of the New World: or, the dawn of the current age

To understand how we reached this stage, we step back to the start of the current stage of globalization, which began before the first industrial revolution, at the watershed moment of 1492, with the European discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

The accepted wisdom, especially in the West, has become that this period of globalization was somehow ‘the rise of the West’, and historians often tend to look for an explanation in specific cultural factors. The idea is that there is something inherent in Western civilization that guaranteed its successful dominance of the world for most of the last half-millennium.

This idea is not new. It has been around since the mid to late 19th century, at which time European writers, especially British writers, started to wonder why Britain and other European nations dominated virtually all humanity. We are talking here of writers such as Herbert Spencer (whose conception of evolution influenced Charles Darwin), Walter Bagehot, Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling. Such writers looked back and assumed that the last 500 years had been a steady series of European (especially English-speaking) victories, culminating in the age in which they were living. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer tried to draw parallels between societies and nature to argue that these victories of European culture over the rest of the world stemmed from something inherent in European culture that had made it quintessentially better than other cultures. In the early 20th century, Max Weber, to explain Asia’s subordinate position to Europe, argued that Confucian culture focused on cultivating “a cultured status position” rather than material or economic progress. This contrasted sharply with the Protestant emphasis on work and wealth creation, which Weber believed spurred the development of modern capitalism.

But the idea of a natural Western tendency towards supremacy is based on a cultural determinism that is vague, unquantifiable, and as incorrect as the racial determinism from which it evolved.

Beginning with the colonial adventure in the New World, we see that in the late 15th and early 16th centuries European disease created wastelands in the Caribbean and South America which enabled a rapid takeover of staggeringly wealthy local civilizations by Spanish and Portuguese invaders. Feasible estimates, based on historical accounts of the first European colonizers and extrapolations from the experience of other populations in places like Australia, Hawaii and the Pacific islands, put the death toll at 80–90% from European diseases like smallpox, influenza and the common cold, among previously unexposed native populations, as documented by Arthur and Bruce Spiess (in their study of the 1616-1622 epidemic in New England), Jared Diamond and others.

Globalization post-1492

Outside the Americas, the rest of the world was also rapidly globalizing after 1492.

To illustrate the nature of the globalization which began then one could look no further than the Acapulco Galleons. This is the trade in Spanish silver from the port of Acapulco, across the Pacific, to Manila, where Chinese traders brought Chinese goods for the Asian, South American and European markets in exchange for Spanish silver from Mexican mines. The trade began in the early 1500s, and lasted almost 300 years. To service this trade network, the Spanish built what were then the largest ships in the world in order to take their new-found silver to the Chinese traders in Manila.

The results of the Acapulco-Manila trade system were not just a flood of Chinese goods such as porcelain and silk into European markets, and a further enrichment of Spain, but also the creation of a ship building industrial sector in the Philippines, the introduction of chili peppers from South America into Chinese cooking (imagine how different the world would be without that), and also the re-monetization of the Ming Empire and an economic boom in China (which was suffering from hyper-inflation due to its use of fiat paper currency) thanks to the influx of Spanish silver.

Portuguese history over a couple of centuries provides another example that serves to demonstrate that globalization since 1492 was not just a one way street (the rise of the West) but rather the rise of a globalized system that had both winners and losers in both the east and the west. We can see clearly that this was a period of competition between nations, both West and East, and not a period of uninhibited European expansion.

The Portuguese had been one of the first to establish overseas trading networks in north Africa and then outside the Mediterranean, in the 15th and 16th centuries.

But in the 17th century, they lost the Spice Islands in Indonesia to the Dutch (1605), as well as Sri Lanka and Malacca (Malacca is the port on the south-west tip of Malaysia which was the major port for trade between Asia and the Indian ocean — the same role played by Singapore today). Portugal’s port of Hormuz was captured by a joint British-Persian force (1622); the port of Hooghly (which was an important Bengali port now replaced by Calcutta) was taken by the Indian Mughal imperial forces in 1632; Omani forces took the strategically significant Muscat in 1650, having taken Ras Al Khaimah (now an emirate of the UAE) from the Portuguese in 1633, and then the Omanis took Mombasa and Zanzibar in 1698, creating the Omani empire which flourished through the 18th and 19th centuries in competition with both Britain and Portugal.

While Mughals, Persians, Omanis and Portuguese were contesting the Persian Gulf and the trade routes around the Indian sub-continent, the Ottomans were expanding their empire, having dealt the coup de grâce to the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire with the capture of Constantinople in 1453.

For the late 15th century witnessed two significant geopolitical shifts.

The Portuguese and Spanish monarchs completed the recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from the remnants of the Arab Muslim caliphate and then took South America.

And the Turkish Ottomans dealt the final blow to the eastern Roman Empire and then built on that success by swallowing up the provinces of the declining Arab caliphate through the Levant and North Africa and into Arabia and consolidating their hold over the Balkans and large parts of south eastern Europe. In 1592 and 1683 the Ottomans were able to besiege Vienna.

Further to the east, in India, an empire was rising. The first Moghul emperor, Babur, a descendant of both Timur (Tamerlane) on his father’s side and Genghis Khan on his mother’s, was born in 1483 in the Fergana Valley, in what is today Uzbekistan. At the age of just 12, he inherited a small kingdom but faced constant rebellions and rival claimants. In 1526, Babur marched into northern India with a relatively small but disciplined army. At Panipat, he faced Ibrahim Lodi, the last sultan of Delhi, who commanded a much larger force. But Babur brought with him a game-changing technology: field artillery, used cleverly in combination with cavalry and mobile tactics.

Over the next few years, Babur consolidated control over the northern plains, defeating powerful Rajput coalitions and Afghan remnants. His reign was brief, he died in 1530 just four years after his great victory. It was his grandson, Akbar the Great, who would truly forge the Mughal Empire into a lasting institution. Under Akbar and his successors, the Mughals became rulers of a hybrid Indo-Persian state that fused Central Asian, Islamic, and Indian traditions.

The rise of the Mughals transformed the subcontinent. They introduced new forms of governance, artistic styles (including the Taj Mahal under Shah Jahan), and a political unity not seen since the Mauryas over a millennium earlier. Their legacy would shape South Asia’s politics, culture, and identity well into the modern era. At the same time, the Mughals creating a textile trade network that came to represent 25% of world industrial output by the early 18th century.

As noted above, views of the period of globalization since 1492 have been invariably colored by the Western perspective, which has perhaps understandably seen it as the ‘rise of the West’. But it is more correct to see this period as one of intensifying globalization that affected both East and West, and brought both winners and losers on both sides.

Western Dominance as an Industrial Phase

What truly changed the balance was the Industrial Revolution. With mechanized production, steam power, and modern finance, Western European nations gained a significant edge in the 19th century. This shift was real, but it was built on the capital accumulated from previous centuries of colonial extraction, not the inherent spirit of European culture.

The industrial era enabled Western imperialism to reach new heights, but it also set the stage for the next global turn. As technological diffusion accelerated, the same tools that built Western power became available to others.

The Return of the East—and the End of Cultural Determinism

By the late 20th century, the narrative of inevitable Western dominance began to unravel. The rise of the Asian Tigers—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong—followed by the re-emergence of China as a global power, revealed the flexibility and dynamism of non-Western societies.

Interestingly, the same cultural frameworks once blamed for Asia’s supposed stagnation, like Confucianism, were reinterpreted as assets in the new capitalist order. Values such as discipline, filial duty, and collective harmony were now seen as drivers of success. This abrupt reversal shows how malleable and politically convenient the idea of “cultural explanation” can be.

In truth, culture is too fluid and multifaceted to serve as a predictive engine of historical development. While it shapes values and behaviors, it cannot be quantified or isolated as a causal force. Material conditions, such as geography, resources, technology, economic development, and trade, offer far more grounded explanations.

A Global History, Not a Western One

The story of the last 500 years is not a simple tale of Western triumph. It is a chapter in the broader saga of globalization, a turbulent, multi-centered process that has at times lifted some and humbled others.

Western dominance, while real at the moment, is historically grounded and could be lost. Indeed, Western dominance at this time is really American dominance and therefore dependent upon America’s fortunes going forward. The technological leveling of the playing field, combined with demographic and economic shifts, suggests that the “rise of the West” may be understood not as description of destiny, but as a phase, a powerful phase, but not inevitable and not cemented in place.

By reframing the past in global rather than civilizational terms, we can move beyond outdated myths of cultural superiority and better understand the forces that have shaped our world—and those that will shape its future.